On 9/11, Air Force One pilot's only concern was President Bush's safety

We landed Sept. 10 in Sarasota, Fla., and were scheduled to leave the next morning, after President Bush's appearance at an elementary school.

I'd been with Air Force One since 1992, and was promoted to chief presidential pilot earlier in the year.

On the morning of 9/11, everything seemed normal when I arrived at the airport. We went through briefings for security, maintenance and navigation. The Secret Service gave an all-clear. I was talking with flight attendants about the menu when our radio operator called me upstairs and said, "You've got to see this, sir."

A plane had flown into one of the towers at the World Trade Center, but it seemed like an accident. Our radios, which normally go crazy if something's going on, were quiet - no squawking about an emergency - so I went back downstairs.

Moments later, the radio operator called me back. A second aircraft had struck. I watched replays on TV, realizing it was no accident. Then they showed Mr. Bush in a classroom, with White House Chief of Staff Andy Card whispering in his ear. It's my understanding he was saying, "Mr. President, we are under attack."

Radios and phones on Air Force One came alive. The Secret Service created a huge security perimeter on the tarmac. My boss, Mark Rosenker, called and told me to depart as soon as the president got on board.

There are written protocols to follow in a nuclear attack, a chemical attack or anything like that. I knew someone was hijacking airliners and hitting targets. But there was no manual for terrorists in suicide planes. The sky was filled with other aircraft, and I really didn't know who had hijacked what. Was Air Force One among the targets? I needed a plan to make sure the president was safe.

I was still married then, and had three kids. But there was so much going on I didn't have time to get emotional or think about anything but my job. Communications systems were overwhelmed with traffic. Key officials were being evacuated in Washington, D.C., and cell calls that got through were breaking up. Information was mixed with rumor. We had to switch to the military radio network. The president couldn't reach key people on regular phones because people like the secretary of Defense had abandoned buildings in D.C. Cellphones were useless because the networks were saturated.

At one point, Mr. Bush advised me through a staffer that we were a target. The message, using a code name for Air Force One: "Angel is next."

Some flight attendants were crying, asking what they should tell the media in the back of the plane. I made all the crew members shut off their cellphones. We were at war, and I didn't want to take a chance that someone would slip up and leak our location or destination.

I asked for an armed guard at the cockpit door while Secret Service agents double-checked the identity of everyone on board. My military training told me to avoid the predictable - to stay out of Washington, D.C. I thought we should fly to a secure air base along the East Coast, or to Camp David. Nobody took into account that a proud Texan would be in office. He wanted to fly straight to the nation's capital - to go back and fight. So we took off - it was a full-thrust departure, up like a rocket - on a course to Andrews Air Force Base.

Upstairs, I'm flying the aircraft, trying to make decisions to keep the president secure. Downstairs, the president is in his cabin with staffers, making decisions for the future of the country. We could hear radio calls with Vice President Cheney and others. Fighter jets were scrambled along the East Coast. The president authorized F-16 pilots to shoot down terrorist-controlled airliners. Over the phone, Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, helped convince Mr. Bush to veer away from Washington, D.C. They left it to me to choose a course.

We were over Gainesville when air-traffic controllers announced, "Air Force One, we have unknown traffic coming behind you. They've shut off their transponder and they're descending into you."

This was not a scenario I envisioned when I enrolled at Tulane University 25 years earlier. My career plan was chemical engineering. But during the first semester, I sat next to a guy in military uniform. We started talking, and he took me to the Air Force ROTC office, where I was offered a scholarship if I signed on the dotted line. So that's what I did.

I was never one of those kids looking up in the sky at planes, dreaming of flight. If it had been a Navy ROTC guy sitting next to me, I'd have become a ship guy. I graduated in 1979 and went to work as a rocket engineer at the Air Force Foreign Technology Division in Ohio.

Some of the guys there were pilots, so I applied for flight school and eventually became an instructor at Williams Air Force Base in Mesa. Five years later, I put in for assignment as a pilot for VIPs in D.C. I just thought it would be neat flying around the first lady, the vice president and members of Congress. By 1992, I was a co-pilot aboard Air Force One. I remember my first time at the controls, flying this giant Boeing 747 onto a tiny runway in Akron, Ohio, knowing I had President Clinton aboard - the commander in chief. You don't want to do anything wrong.

In June 2001, six months after George W. Bush took office, I became the twelfth presidential pilot to serve as commander of Air Force One. It's a ton of responsibility. But we had intelligent people with the best possible training and equipment.

Three months later, on Sept. 11, all of us were put to a test in a plane carrying 45 people - White House staffers, journalists and the leader of the free world. When controllers asked if we were aware of an unidentified plane bearing down on us, we didn't have a clue. I kept thinking that the sky is huge and the chances of one aircraft finding another are just infinitesimal. But I worried that maybe we were followed as we took off from Sarasota.

Air Force One has defenses to protect against attack, but no offensive capability. So I changed course. As we veered west, the other plane did not follow: It was simply an airliner with a malfunctioning transponder.

We got word that another jet had crashed in Pennsylvania, a bad moment for Air Force pilots because we thought our fighters had shot it down. For a while, I was just flying around to kill time until Washington, D.C., was deemed safe. I knew hijackers could hear radio transmissions, so we went silent and contacted controllers by phone, trying to become invisible. F-16s were scrambled to protect us.

The president wanted to get back on the ground - to speak to America - so we landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

It was a brief stopover, and then we headed to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. This is the U.S. Strategic Command Underground Command Center, built for nuclear war. We were only on the ground 90 minutes before President Bush looked at me and said, "Tillman, let's go home."

We picked up more F-16 escorts along the way. Flying into the capital, you could see the Pentagon still smoldering. Nine hours after the ordeal began, we landed at Andrews and the crew heaved a collective sigh of relief.

I stayed up that night, wrestling with questions: What was coming next? How could these people have been training for this attack in our own country? What do I need to do to keep the president safe? I didn't want my kids to hear people saying years later that I was the pilot who got President Bush killed.

I knew we'd have to start over again the next day, because Bush would want to go to New York. We came up with a decoy plan so that we could secretly take him to a safe location. After he visited Ground Zero, we made it look like he boarded Air Force One and returned to Washington, but he actually got on the Gulf Stream III with me, and we flew to Camp David. Nobody knew he was there, and that's pretty much how we operated for several months after 9/11.

After Sept. 11, there were all kinds of security changes. We used decoy operations to conceal the president's location, and I had more direct dealings with him. The stress gradually eased until November of 2003, when Mr. Bush decided to go to Baghdad for a Thanksgiving visit with troops. This was a war zone. They were shooting planes down with rockets at the time. Only five people were briefed. The president ordered me not to tell anyone, but my Air Force bosses were still upset because I kept them in the dark.

We picked up the president in Texas with his staff and a bunch of reporters. None of them knew they were about to fly halfway around the world and into a combat theater. We masked our transponder, flew with almost no communications, changed our call signs. It went perfectly.

I worried about everything after 9/11, and there were threats coming in from all over the world. There were documentaries about Air Force One, and we got intelligence about terrorists watching them for vulnerabilities. But we never really had a near-miss kind of incident.

I retired from the Air Force and took a job as pilot for Discount Tire, based here in Scottsdale. The president promoted me to brigadier general before he left office. The Senate never confirmed me, but knowing that Mr. Bush thought enough of me to do that is what matters.

In March of 2009, I was in Texas and we got together. He talked about his book, 9/11 and other flights. It was great to see him so calm with nothing to worry about, like talking to an old friend.

When I look back on it all, the misconception by some folks is that he was running scared on Sept. 11. That just didn't happen. President Bush was making the decisions all day. But you just didn't know what was going on - there was so much confusion - and the goal was to keep him safe.